GAA consider ticket price cut
The list of topics was long and varied with everything from technology to tickets being discussed and dissected during the informal chat in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza hotel, which is acting as HQ for the visit to south-east Asia.
Though it is hot and humid in KL, the cold realities of life 10,000 kilometres away in Ireland have not been forgotten and so it was only a matter of time before a question about the cost of attending games was broached.
The GAA have frozen their ticket prices for the last five years and introduced discounted packages for all games apart from the All-Ireland finals but GAA president Christy Cooney suggested here that they may be about to go one step further by bringing prices down.
“It is something we are giving serious consideration to,” he said.
“We are reviewing our whole ticketing system for next year and I would hope that, if not next week, than very soon after it we will announce some decisions on our ticketing pricing for next season.
“Like everything else, we have to produce a budget for next year and we have to balance the books.
“If the association reduces the prices in regard to tickets, and that includes the provincial councils, something else will have to suffer, with the amount of money we have available for the clubs and the county boards.
“So we have to be aware of that as well.
“There are swings and roundabouts but we are very conscious of our position as regards to our patrons, we want to give them the best value we can.”
The issue of money arose elsewhere in the conversation and it appears that the Director General Pauric Duffy’s much-anticipated discussion document on the vexed question of underhand payments to managers will appear before Christmas.
Cooney described it yesterday as one of the major issues hanging over the association and called on county officials across the country to buy into the attempt to remove what has long been a stain on the GAA’s amateur status.
“The last discussion we had with county chairmen there was a lot of honesty and frankness in the room stating exactly where we are. At this stage everybody requires and needs a pathway forward on this.
“At the end of the day, whatever we bring in, people have to buy into it and not alone buy into it but deliver on it as well.
“There is no point in paying lip service to something and looking under the table as to where exactly the funding is going and not going. We all have to be honest about it.”
Other issues swallowed less time.
The two-month training ban is, it appears, here to stay and there will be no changes to the hurling and football championship structures for the foreseeable future although there may be some tweaking to the playing calendar for 2011.
As for the All-Star tour itself, Cooney has confirmed that the long-standing contract between the GAA and Vodafone to sponsor the awards and traditional end-of-year trip has come to an end.
“The position of Vodafone is that their contract with the All Stars was up last year. We renewed it for another year. As you know, Vodafone has ceased its sponsorship with regard to the All-Ireland football championship, so we’re currently going through a process of finalising our sponsors for our championships for the next number of years.
“We’ll have to look and see if any of our current or future sponsors are interested. If they’re not, then we’ll look at the marketplace and see where we go and that certainly doesn’t exclude Vodafone at all.”
No decision has been made as of yet as to whether the GPA/Opel — whose own contract has another year to go — awards will continue to run alongside the All Stars or if the two are merged.
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